Artist Spotlight #32 – Richard Yot

What do you do?
What I like best is character design, and creating worlds for my characters to live in. My work is all digital, but I try very hard to inject a large dose of hand-made charm into it, to create images that are quirky and fun.

Why do you do it?
Because I love doing it!

Who are your influences?
I very much admire the work of Chris Sickels, otherwise known as Red Nose Studio, and Jonathan Ball AKA Poked Studio. I also look at a very wide range of artists, both mainstream and left-field, and I appreciate craft as well as creativity.

What inspires your work?
I like to look at designs from primitive art, I have a collection of photographs of masks and statues from the Hornimann Museum which are a very useful source of inspiration. Other than that I am also a huge fan of French-language comic books, which have been an inspiration to me since my childhood.

What do you like?
I spend most of my spare time reading technical books to do with digital art or drawing, or watching video tutorials, so I clearly like being a geek. I like working too, a lot. I also like good TV, like Six Feet Under and Mad Men.

What don’t you like?
I don’t like being away from my work, because I miss doing it.